Patrick Thompson - Seeing the Wires

‘Different signals,’ Jack was saying. I’d missed something.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very true.’

‘I’ve become a matrix,’ he said.

‘Spin used to say there were matrices at building sites,’ I said.

‘The scaffolding?’

I nodded.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Jack.

That had been a month ago, in the same pub, at about the same time of night. Since then Jack had had the bodywork touched up in a few new places. He turned up late, halfway through my second pint. I knew he’d had something new pierced, because he was walking as though he had a porcupine between his thighs. He was wearing a jumper that had been washed on the incorrect cycle. The sleeves ended inches before his hands began. His wrists were covered in bright swirls and healing scabs. He bought us a pint each and sat, wincing.

‘Oof,’ he said, reaching under the table and tugging at something.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ow. Ow . I don’t think that’s where you belong, is it?’

He fidgeted and fiddled and finally settled, nicely uncomfortable.

‘What’s it this time?’ I asked. I had to know, even though I didn’t really want to. It was like watching operations on television. I’d want to switch channels or put my hands over my eyes. Instead I’d sit and watch, horrified. He shuffled carefully. When he winced, his eyebrow ring stood straight out from his brow.

‘Perineum ring,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Perineum. It’s the hairy bit at the back of your bollocks.’

‘I know what it is. I meant, “ What? ”’

‘I hadn’t had it done yet.’ As if that explained it. ‘These stools are a bit hard, aren’t they?’ He adjusted himself indecorously.

‘Not really, no. Perhaps having your perineum pierced has made you sensitive.’

‘I won’t be riding my bike for a couple of weeks, that’s fucking certain.’

‘So it’s the bus, is it?’

‘It will be this week. Perhaps I’ll catch you on your way home. Everything nice at the office, is it? No sudden shortages of pens or anything?’

Jack often baited me like this. He was saying my life was mundane. I knew that. I was the one living it. I sometimes had an urge to hide a powerful magnet somewhere near Jack, just to see what happened. He settled at an angle, as though preparing to fart. The landlord eyed him sleepily.

‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.

‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’

‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’

I got the next round in.

‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.

‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’

‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.

‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.

‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.

‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.

I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.

Jack emptied his glass.

‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.

‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’

I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’

‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’

‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.

‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald .’

Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald , which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.